While exploring the world and the associated conservation issues I've been noting down my reflections and discoveries. Some posts are more organized while others are simple notes.

I generally focus on conservation issues effecting biodiversity, land use/abuse, research, and job opportunities that I have come across. Most of the opportunities come from the Opps page and you can click on the button below to take you there.

Mr. Nordhaus says this is the vision of the post-apocalyptic world I fear. It is a lived experience for many and to get us past this, energy needs to be worked with rather than fought.

“The great Existential Environmental Threat that we keep hearing about where we all live in a post-apocalyptic world is basically what the average Somali lives like now. What that is is poverty, what that is is energy poverty.” Mr. Nordhaus, Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, ended his presentation at last night’s Aquatic Academy with this answer to a participant’s question. That startled me. That startled me partially because I believe that he is right in asserting that globally we are striving for more than that. It also startled me because I can’t imagine that I, as a wealthy Westerner, am so blind to not understand that that feared world is not one of a lack of (or polluted) natural resources but a world that is too poor to access those natural resources. That is too simplistic a view for the plight of an East African famine but it does spark a thought within my head that the causes are only partially environmental and more a case of tribal terrorism, gangsterism, corporate and foreign exploitation, wealth inequality, political corruption, the all-too biological characteristic of congregating and reproducing en masse, and the geographic luck of the draw as far as natural resources go. It makes me think that with better technologies of political development and more wealth for more people, the environmental concerns are exactly what Mr. Shellenberger described as “trade-offs” that will be addressed. Mr. Nordhaus followed Mr. Steve Chazen, president of Occidental Petroleum. Both individuals shared that there is a growing global trend of oil and gas consumption that will not stop anytime soon. This has nothing to say about morality or whether it is “right or wrong” that this trend is growing but that it is the reality. In fact, the only morality presented by either speaker was whether it is “right” to deny anybody in the world access to energy needs that are available to everyone else. I had to write down my question because I have difficulty understanding how I feel about this information. Here is the question that took me four weeks to articulate: “To get to a ‘green’ planet that addresses environmental concerns and raises the basic needs for 9 billion people, a cheap and clean energy is required. With our best science now, your position is that cheap and clean energy is nuclear and solar. To get there, to get away from high emissions, we need a good transition fuel and that is shale gas or fracking. Mr. Shellenberger mentioned last week that we need to consciously address the “environmental trade-offs” along the way but if we continue down this path, wont the environmental trade-offs become too large? Wont events like the Deepwater blowout and Fukishima hit a tipping point that will destroy the Earth before we get to that point?” His response was perfect: there is little to no scientific evidence that those large-scale events did much lasting harm. Additionally, there is little evidence that there has ever been a tipping point that we as humans haven’t been able to innovate ourselves past. Dr. Schubel carried the response further by saying that the organics from agriculture coming down the Mississippi for over two hundred years has done far, far worse to the Gulf than the Deepwater blowout. His response is that we’ve found that nature is not fragile and we have found that it responds well to anomalies and resiliently bounces back but does not respond well to chronic problems. Dr. Schubel ended by saying that environmentalists are losing this effort and we are losing it big. My question to that is: what are we losing then? And that goes to the heart of the discussion presented by this Aquatic Academy. These new paradigms are waking up to a reality that no matter what, consumer trends are not changing and even if they do, it is absolute fantasy, a mathematical impossibility to believe that we will achieve 350 ppm Carbon in the atmosphere. Our focus needs to be to save our biodiversity, keep our wild-lands wild, raise the global wealth and access to basic needs, and work toward transitioning to cheap and clean energy. In the science fiction parlance that I know, this means taking us to a Type 1 Civilization on the Kardashev scale. And as David Deutsch points out, this is the only way to achieve humanity’s Beginning of Infinity.